Autobiography and the Modernist Consciousness in Conrad and Joyce

The book shows how Conrad and Joyce project different shades of consciousness- socio-political moral religious individual and artistic from an autobiographical perspective to enrich modernist values. It evaluates the achievement of the authors’ use of this technique of parallel narratives to portray the nihilism of the early twentieth century. Joseph Conrad in exposing the mode of existence in the early twentieth century suggests that man lives in a civilization in which obsession with materialistic ambitions undermines genuine values. James Joyce in a similar vein reveals that social arrangement hinders progress and so the artist has to overthrow rather than embrace the nihilistic aspects of the society. A comparative analysis of the texts of Conrad and Joyce shows how these authors artistically integrate facts or history with fiction.